SYMBALOO LAUNCHES PERSONAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT FOR TEACHERS AND STUDENTS

SymbalooEDU Aims to Assist with Integrating Technology into the Classroom.

20 SEPTEMBER 2010, COSTA MESA, CA – SEPTEMBER 20, 2010

Summary

Symbaloo released today a new beta version developed specifically for teachers. Appropriately named SymbalooEDU, this new version comes paired with the release of new features aimed to assist educators in gathering the best educational online resources. Educators refer to this visual aggregation as a Personal Learning Environment, and is a hot topic in the technology for education community.

“SymbalooEDU is made by teachers for teachers, with over 50,000 teachers using Symbaloo worldwide, they have really paved the way for SymbalooEDU by contributing online during the development process.” said Klaas Lameijer, Symbaloo’s Chief Executive Officer, “Symbaloo is now more functional then ever for technology in the classroom, the teachers asked and we listened.”

Beta Tester Feedback

SymbalooEDU was created with the input of educators. Further teacher participation is encouraged by Symbaloo to improve content and usability.Wendy Drexler, educational researcher and former K12 teacher who recently worked with over one hundred 7th grade science students shared that “SymbalooEDU is truly a tool that can empower students and if applied with teacher support, can facilitate digital literacy skills and support life long learning.”

SymbalooEDU comes with the ability to embed various web 2.0 tools from across the internet. Tools like Google docs, Flickr, Slideshare, Teachertube and more are now fully functional from within Symbaloo, making it a safe environment for students to gather resources and store the media onto an eportfolio.

Randy Hollinger, middle school science instructor says, “Our students use SymbalooEDU to organize their networked tools and websites, save their work online as an eportfolio and then share their portfolios with one another for peer review...a great tool to teach your kids how to be a networked learner.”

Pricing

SymbalooEDU will be offered in three packages. The basic version will still be free and will contain everything Symbaloo offers, while the premium packages will include private branding for schools/districts, teacher training via webinars and will include user statistics. Detailed pricing can be found at: http://www.symbalooedu.com/?page_id=54

About Symbaloo

Symbaloo is an award winning free online tool used to visually organize and share the best of the web. This three year new tech start up originated in Holland and was introduced in the U.S. in May of this year with the release of the new Symbaloo 2.0 version. Currently Symbaloo has 500,000 users per month worldwide and is available in 6 languages and used in over 100 countries.